A Global Goring 

President elect sets out on agenda to revive frightening Lieberman/Warner legislation

President elect Barack Obama used his speech at a Los Angeles summit last night to reinvigorate a push for the revival of a frightening proposal to slash carbon emissions by 80 per cent, a move that would inflict a new Great Depression, cost millions of jobs, and sink America to near third world status.
“My presidency will mark a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change,” Obama said in a video message to governors and others attending a Los Angeles summit on the issue.
“In the roughly four-minute message, Obama reiterated his support for a cap-and-trade system approach to cutting green house gases. He would establish annual targets to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them another 80 percent by 2050,” reports the Associated Press.
Obama’s mission is to revive and expand the defeated 2007 Lieberman/Warner bill, “America’s Climate Security Act,” which proposed a cap and trade system to reduce carbon emissions 70 per cent by 2050. Read more »

Now that Obama is our new fearless leader, everything is going to be just fine. There will be no more war, we’ll have Government Health Care, all our mortgages will be forgiven. It will all be just Rainbows and Butterflies. And now we can finally address Global Warming, we aren’t going to need anymore coal fired power plants and we will totally be off gasoline by 2015. How are we going to do this you ask? Well we’re all going to run our cars on happy butterfly pee, that’s how.

Even if you believe CO2 emissions cause global warming, there are unintended consequences when the government tries to solve this hyped problem.
The Wall Street Journal reports that a proposal circulating in Britain would establish personal CO2 rationing. Each person would be allotted some CO2 emissions. Every gasoline purchase, air conditioner turned on and jet flight would be charged against your account. Run out of credits, and you must buy more from anyone with a surplus. So much for the idea that only polluting factories pay a price to fight global warming. Of course, administering the plan would cost billions of dollars in taxes. Read more »

Our friends at Minnesotans for Global Warming — the folks who brought us the fabulous video “If We Had Some Global Warming” — have just released a new number deliciously set to John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

Moscow – The nations with the world’s three biggest reserves of natural gas – Russia, Iran, and Qatar – are quietly moving ahead to form a “gas OPEC,” an organization modeled after the oil cartel.

In Tehran last week, representatives of the Russian natural-gas monopoly Gazprom met with counterparts from Iran and Qatar and agreed to create “a big gas troika.” The group will meet quarterly to discuss pricing and supplies. Between them, these three countries hold an estimated 55 percent of known global gas reserves. The possibility of a cartel has long been opposed in Washington and European capitals. Read more »

(New York Times) - In case anyone was wondering if Ohio was a combat zone for Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign, consider that five days before the election the candidate took a 220-mile, six-stop, 12-hour bus tour across the northern breadth of the state. Along the way, he deployed his unofficial running mate, a disappearing and reappearing Joe the Plumber, to try to drive his points home.

It’s slowly killing the McCain candidacy and, like most poisons, it eventually gets around to the vital organs:

59 percent of voters surveyed said that Ms. Palin was not prepared for the job, up 9 percentage points since the beginning of the month. Nearly a third of voters polled said that the vice-presidential selection would be a major factor influencing their vote for president, and those voters broadly favored Senator Barack Obama… The increase in the number of voters who said that Ms. Palin was not prepared was driven almost entirely by Republicans and independents … 8 in 10 Democrats viewed her as unprepared, as well as more than 6 in 10 independents, and 3 in 10 Republicans.

My italics. If the GOP decides that Palin is the future of their party, the GOP won’t have a future. Simple, really. And the same goes for those who promoted her. Getting rid of Kristol and all he represents is a prerequisite for conservative renewal.

Asked by a third-grader what a vice president does, Republican candidate Sarah Palin responded that the vice president is the president’s “team mate” but also “runs the Senate” and “can really get in there with the senators and make a lot of good policy changes.”
While aimed at a typical 8-year-old, Palin’s explanations oversimplify the Constitution’s definition of the duties of the vice president and don’t match the office’s traditional role in Senate activities.
The vice president’s main duty is to replace the president if the president dies, resigns, is removed from office or can no longer carry out his or her duties for other reasons. The Constitution names the vice president as the president of the Senate but allows the vice president to cast a vote only to break a tie. Read more »

What we have here — to borrow a line from the old movie “Cool Hand Luke” — is a failure to communicate. By all rights, we should be having a fierce debate over the role of government. What should it do, for whom and why? What can we afford? Who should pay? These questions would suggest a campaign that seriously engages the future, but instead, we have a bidding war between candidates to see who can promise the most appealing package of new spending programs and tax cuts.

As we watch the conventions, we should recognize that we’ve entered an era of fantasy politics. Like fantasy football and baseball, fantasy politics is an exercise in make-believe that is intended to keep its players occupied and to make the winners feel good. Barack Obama and John McCain emit pleasing slogans and programs that, as often as not, are disconnected from the country’s actual problems they’ll encounter in office. Read more »

Cane farmers burn off at a cane farm near Sertaozinho, about 200 miles north-east of Sao Paulo. Brazil, the world’s largest producer and exporter of sugar and ethanol, is a pioneer in the use of ethanol made from sugar cane to power cars.
The apostles of biofuels would have us believe that the congested streets of Sao Paulo offer a glimpse of a better future. There, traffic jams are made of flex-fuel cars that run off a growing menu of bio and fossil fuel mixtures and all filling stations offer “alcohol” and “gas” at the pump.

It was the city that George Bush visited last year to unveil a package of incentives to developing nations designed to spur the creation of a cartel of biofuel producers soon dubbed the “Opec for ethanol”. Read more »